The Hidden Years Read online

  As she hesitated at the door, the surgeon turned impatiently towards her.

  'Are you sure she asked for me?' she whispered.

  As he watched her for a moment he saw the self-confident, sensually stunning woman reduced to the nervous, uncertain child. It was the dangerous allure of seeing that child within such a woman that made him say more brusquely than he otherwise might, 'There's nothing for you to fear. Your mother's injuries are all internal. Outwardly…'

  Sage glared at him. Did he really think she was so weak, so self-absorbed that it was fear of what she might see that kept her chained here outside the ward? And then her anger died as swiftly as it had been born. It wasn't his fault; what could he know of the complexities of her relationship with her mother? She didn't really understand them herself. She pushed open the door and walked into the ward. It was small, with only four beds, and bristling with equipment.

  Her mother was the ward's only occupant. She lay on one of the high, narrow beds, surrounded by machinery.

  How tiny she looked, Sage marvelled as she stared down at her. Her once naturally fair hair, now discreetly tinted blonde, was hidden out of sight beneath a cap; her mother's skin, so white and pale, and so different from her own with its decidedly olive tint, could have been the skin of a woman in her late forties, not her early sixties, Sage reflected as she absorbed an outer awareness of the tubes connected to her mother's body, which she deliberately held at bay as she concentrated instead on the familiar and less frightening aspects of her still figure.

  Her breathing was laboured and difficult, but the eyes fixed on her own hadn't changed—cool, clear, all-seeing, all-knowing… a shade of grey which could deepen to lavender or darken to slate depending on her mood.

  She was frowning now, but it was not the quick, light frown with which Sage was so familiar, the frown that suggested that whoever had caused it had somehow not just failed but disappointed as well. How many times had that frown marked the progress of her own life, turning her heart to lead, shredding her pride, reducing her to rebellious, helpless rage?

  This frown, though, was different, deeper, darker, the eyes that watched her full of unfamiliar shadows.

  'Sage…'

  Was it instinct alone that made her cover her mother's hand with her own, that made her sit down at her side, and say as evenly as she could, 'I'm here, Mother…'?

  Mother…what a cold, distant word that was, how devoid of warmth and feeling. As a small child she had called her 'Mummy'. David, ten years her senior, had preferred the affectionately teasing 'Ma', but then David had been permitted so much more licence, had been given so much more love… Stop it, she warned herself. She wasn't here to dwell on the past. The past was over.

  'It's all right,' she whispered softly. 'It's all right, Mother. You're going to be fine…'

  Just for a moment the grey eyes lightened and mocked. They seemed to say that they knew her platitude for exactly what it was, making Sage once more feel a child in the presence of an adult.

  'Sage, there's something I want you to do…' The words were laboured and strained. Sage had to bend closer to the bed to catch them. 'My diaries, in my desk at Cottingdean… You must read them… All of you…'

  She stopped speaking and closed her eyes while Sage stared at her. What on earth was her mother talking about? What diaries? Had her mind perhaps been affected by her injuries?

  She stared uncertainly at the woman in the bed, as her mother opened her eyes and demanded fiercely, 'Promise me, Sage… Promise me you will do as I say… Promise me…'

  Dutifully, docilely almost, Sage swallowed and whispered, 'I promise…' and then, unable to stop herself, she cried out, 'But why me…? Why did you ask for me? Why not Faye? She's so much closer to you…'

  The grey eyes seemed to mock her again. Without her knowing it, her fingers had curled tightly round the hand she was still holding.

  'Faye doesn't have your ruthlessness, your discipline… Neither does she have your strength.' The voice dropped to a faint sigh.

  Beneath her fingers, Sage felt the thready pulse flicker and falter and a fear greater than anything she had ever known, a fear that overwhelmed anger, resentment, pain and even love poured through her and she cried out harshly, 'Mother…no,' without really knowing what she was crying out for.

  Then she heard the light, quiet voice saying reassuringly, 'I'm here, Sage. When you read the diaries, then you will understand.' She closed her eyes, so obviously exhausted that for a moment Sage thought she had actually died.

  It was the surgeon's firm touch on her arm, his quiet words of reassurance that stilled her panic.

  'She wants me to read her diaries,' she told him, too bewildered to understand her need to confide, to understand…

  'Sometimes when people are closest to death they sense what is happening to them and they dwell on certain aspects of their lives and the lives of those around them.'

  'I never even knew she kept a diary.' Sage was speaking more to herself than him. 'I never knew… She made me promise,' she told him inconsequentially, knowing already that it was a promise she must keep. A promise she had to keep, and yet already she was dreading doing so, dreading what she might read… dreading perhaps confronting the truth and the pain she thought she had long ago put behind her.

  As the surgeon escorted her from the ward, she cast a last, lingering look at her mother. 'Will she…?'

  Will she die? she wanted to ask, even while she knew that she didn't want to know the answer, that she wanted to hold on to the hope… the belief that because her mother was alive she would live.

  She had often heard people say that there was no pain, no guilt, no awareness of life passing too quickly more sharp-edged than when an adult experienced the death of a parent.

  Her father had died while she was a teenager, his death a release to him and something that barely touched her life. She had been at home then. Her father, because of his poor health, had never played a large part in her life. He was a remote, cosseted figure on whom her mother's whole life pivoted and yet somehow someone who was distant from her own.

  Until today she had thought she had stopped loving her mother over fifteen years ago, her love eroded by too much pain, too much betrayal—and she had decided then that the only way to survive the catalyst of that betrayal was for her to forge a separate, independent life of her own.

  And that was what she had done.

  She now had her own career, her own life. A life that took her from London to New York, from New York to LA to Rome, to Paris, to all those places in the new world where people had heard by word of mouth of her skills as a muralist.

  There were houses all over the world—the kind of houses owned by people who would never dream of wanting them to be featured in even the most upmarket of glossy publications—where one of her murals was a prized feature of the decor. She was sought after and highly paid, working only on favoured commissions. Her life was her own… or so she had thought.

  Why me? she had asked, and even in extremity her mother had not spared her. Of course, gentle, tender Faye would never have been able to bring herself to read another person's diaries… to pry into their privacy. What was it, then, that made it so important that she read them… that they all read them… so important that her mother should insist with what might well be her dying breath that they do so?

  There was only one way that she was going to find out.

  There was nothing to be gained in putting off what had to be done, Sage acknowledged as she left the hospital. As chance would have it, she was in between commissions at the moment and there was nothing of sufficient urgency in her life to excuse her from fulfilling the promise she had made to her mother, nothing to stop her from going immediately to Cottingdean, no matter how little she wanted to do so.

  Cottingdean, the family's house, was on the outskirts of an idyllic English village set in a fold of the hills to the south-east of Bath. It was a tiny rural community over which her mother presi
ded as its loving and much-loved matriach. Sage had never felt the same love for it that the rest of her family shared—for some reason it had stifled her, imprisoned her, and as a teenager she had ached for wider skies, broader horizons.

  Cottingdean: Faye and Camilla would be waiting there for her, waiting to pounce on her with anxious questions about her mother.

  How ironic it was that Faye, her sister-in-law, should be able to conjure from her mother the love she herself felt she had always been denied—and yet she could not resent Faye for it.

  She sighed a little as she drove west heading for the M4. Poor Faye—life had not been kind to her, and she was too fragile… too vulnerable to withstand too many of its blows.

  Sage remembered how Faye had looked the day she and David married…a pale, fragile, golden rose, openly adoring the man she was marrying, but that happiness had been short-lived. David had been killed in a tragic, useless road accident, leaving Faye to bring up Camilla on her own.

  Sage hadn't been surprised when her mother had invited Faye to make her home at Cottingdean; after all, in the natural course of events, David would eventually have inherited the estate. Faye had accepted her offer— the pretty ex-vicarage in the village, which David had bought for his bride, was sold and Faye and her one-year-old daughter moved into Cottingdean. They had lived there ever since and Camilla had never known any other home, any other way of life.

  Sage smiled as she thought of her niece; almost eighteen years old and probably in the eyes of the world spoiled rotten by all of them. If the three of them suffered deeply in losing David then some of the suffering had been eased by the gift he had left behind him.

  One day Cottingdean and everything that it represented would be Camilla's, and already Sage had seen that her mother was discreetly teaching and training her one grandchild in the duties that would then fall on her shoulders.

  Sage didn't envy her that inheritance, but she did sometimes envy her her sunny, even-tempered disposition, and the warmth that drew people to her in enchantment.

  As yet she was still very much a child, still not really aware of the power she held.

  Sage sighed. Of all of them Camilla would be the most deeply affected if her mother… Her hands gripped the wheel of the Porsche until her knuckles whitened. Even now she could not allow her mind to form the word 'die', couldn't allow herself to admit the possibility…the probability of her mother's death.

  Unanalysed but buried deep within the most secret, sacred part of her, the instinctive, atavistic part of her that governed her so strongly, lay the awareness that to have refused the promise her mother had demanded of her, or even to have given it and then not to have carried out the task, would somehow have been to have helped to still the pulse of her mother's life force; it was as though there was some primitive power that linked the promise her mother had extracted from her with her fight against death, and if she broke that promise, even though her mother could not possibly know that it had been broken, it would be as though she had deliberately broken the symbolic silver thread of life.

  She shuddered deeply, sharply aware as she had been on certain other occasions in her life of her own deep-rooted and sometimes disturbing awareness of feelings, instincts that had no logical basis.

  Her long fingers tightened on the steering-wheel. She had none of her mother's daintiness—that had bypassed her to be inherited by Camilla. She had nothing of her mother in her at all, really, and yet in that brief moment of contact, standing beside her mother's bed, it had been for one terrifying milli-second of time as though their souls were one and she had felt as though it were her own her mother's fear and pain, her desperation and her determination; and she had known as well how overwhelmingly important it was to her mother that she kept her promise.

  Because her mother knew she was going to die? A spasm of agony contracted Sage's body. She ought not to be feeling like this; she had dissociated herself from her mother years ago. Oh, she paid lip-service to their relationship, duty visits for her mother's birthday in June, and at Christmas, although she had not spent that Christmas at Cottingdean. She had been working in the Caribbean on the villa of a wealthy French socialite. A good enough excuse for not going home, and one her mother had accepted calmly and without comment.

  She turned off the motorway, following the familiar road signs, frowning a little at the increased heaviness of the traffic, noting the unsuitability of the enormous eight-wheel container trucks for the narrow country lane.

  She overtook one of them on the small stretch of bypass several miles east of the village, glad to be free of its choking diesel fumes.

  They had had a hard winter, making spring seem doubly welcome, the fresh green of the new hedges striking her eye as she drove past them. In the village nothing seemed to have changed, and it amused her that she should find that knowledge reassuring, making her pause to wonder why, when she had been so desperate to escape from the place and its almost too perfect prettiness, she experienced this dread of discovering that it had changed in any way.

  She had rung the house from the hospital and spoken to Faye, simply telling her that she was driving down but not explaining why.

  Whoever had first chosen the site for Cottingdean had chosen well. It sat with its back to the hills, facing south, shielded from the east wind by the ancient oaks planted on the edge of its parkland.

  The original house had been built by an Elizabethan entrepreneur, a merchant who had moved his family from Bristol out into the quiet and healthy solitude of the countryside. It was a solid, sensible kind of house, built in the traditional style, in the shape of the letter E. Later generations had added a jumble of extra buildings to its rear, but, either through lack of wealth or incentive, no one had thought to do anything to alter its stone frontage with its ancient mullions and stout oak door.

  The drive still ran to the rear of the house and the courtyard around it on which were the stables and outbuildings, leaving the front of the house and its vistas completely unspoiled.

  Sage's mother always said that the best way to see Cottingdean for the first time was on foot, crossing the bridge spanning the river, and then through the wooden gate set into the house's encircling garden wall, so that one's first view of it was through the clipped yews that guarded the pathway to the terrace and the front entrance.

  When her mother had come to Cottingdean as a bride, the gardens which now were famous and so admired had been nothing more than a tangle of weeds interspersed with unproductive vegetable beds. Hard to imagine that now when one saw the smooth expanses of fresh green lawn, the double borders with their enviable collections of seemingly carelessly arranged perennials, the knot garden, and the yew hedges which did so much to add to the garden's allure and air of enticing, hidden secrets. All this had been created by her mother—and not, as some people imagined, with money and other people's hard work, but more often than not with her own hands.

  As she drove into the courtyard Sage saw that Faye and Camilla were waiting for her. As soon as she stopped the car both of them hurried up to her, demanding in unison, 'Liz… Gran… how is she?'

  'Holding her own,' she told them as she opened the door and climbed out. 'They don't know the extent of her injuries as yet. I spoke to the surgeon. He said we could ring again tonight…'

  'But when can we see her?' Camilla demanded eagerly.

  'She's on the open visiting list,' Sage told them. 'But the surgeon's told me that he'd like to have her condition stabilised for at least forty-eight hours before she has any more visitors.'

  'But you've seen her,' Camilla pointed out.

  Sage reached out and put her arm round her. She was so precious to them all in different ways, this child of David's. 'Only because she wanted to see me, Camilla… The surgeon was worried that with something preying on her mind she would—'

  'Something preying on her mind… What?'

  'Camilla, let Sage get inside and sit down before you start cross-questioning her,' Faye reprov
ed her daughter gently. 'It isn't a very comfortable drive down from London these days with all the traffic… I wasn't sure what your plans are, but I've asked Jenny to make up your bed.'

  'I'm not sure either,' Sage told her sister-in-law, following her inside and then pausing for a moment as her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the long panelled passageway that led from the back to the front of the house.

  When her mother had first come to Cottingdean this panelling had been covered in paint so thick that it had taken her almost a year to get it clean. Now it glowed mellowly and richly, making one want to reach and touch it.

  'I've asked Jenny to serve afternoon tea in the sitting-room,' Faye told her, opening one of the panelled doors. 'I wasn't sure if you would have had time to have any lunch…'

  Sage shook her head—food was the last thing she wanted.

  The sitting-room was on the side of the house and faced west. It was decorated in differing shades of yellow, a golden, sunny room furnished with an eclectic collection of pieces of furniture which somehow managed to look as though they were meant to be together. Another of her mother's talents.

  It was a warm welcoming room, scented now with late-flowering pots of hyacinths in the exact shade of lavender blue of the carpet covering the floor. A fire burned in the grate, adding to the room's air of welcome, the central heating radiators discreetly hidden away behind grilles.

  'Tell us about Gran, Sage,' Camilla demanded, perching on a damask-covered stool at Sage's feet. 'How is she?'

  She was a pretty girl, blonde like her mother, but, where Faye's blondeness always seemed fairly insipid, Camilla's was warm and alive. Facially she was like her grandmother, with the same startlingly attractive bone-structure and the same lavender-grey eyes.

  'Is she really going to be all right?'

  Sage paused. Over her head, her eyes met Faye's. 'I hope so,' she said quietly, and then added comfortingly, 'She's a very strong person, Camilla. If anyone has the will to fight, to hold on to life…'